The race for a truly seamless interconnection exchange between carriers and service providers heated up considerably this week with dueling announcements from Equinix, an established provider of interconnect services, and start-up CENX, which says it has created the world’s first Carrier-Ethernet exchange.
Those developments join a range of initiatives, from major carriers and from independent alliances, to hunt down one of the last great trophy animals of the telecom world: a seamless all-IP “network of networks” that will connect disparate IP service providers, bypassing the PSTN and eliminating the settlement fees and quality issues that hinder the traditional, carrier-dominated method of bringing together proprietary networks in different regions.
“The world is shrinking, and extending the reach of our services beyond the traditional boundaries is very important to us,” said Clark Peterson, CEO of competitive service provider Telesphere. “Having an Ethernet exchange initiative will help get us there faster.”
Unfortunately, getting there at all will still be a challenge. The fact is several wholesale carriers and exchange providers have tried in the past to set up PSTN alternatives, including spot markets for traffic interconnections, and none have worked so far.
Nan Chen, the founder of CENX, is also the president of the Metro Ethernet Forum, and he is touting the capabilities of Ethernet to bring about this hub-and-spoke world where one line in connects an operator to everyone else in the hub, and the architecture of the exchange takes care of the QoS, service translation, verification, security and billing.
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| Chen: Not a zero-sum game. |
“The biggest technological challenge to meeting the requirements for a true carrier exchange is really the flexibility required,” said Chen. “Every single service for any given service provider is different from any other providers’ offerings, whether in terms of SLAs, performance, bandwidth profiles, and so on. The flexibility of Carrier Ethernet is its biggest strength.”
The NxN Problem
There are other ways to do it. XConnect, for example, has established the Global Alliance Federation that enables free peering between operator members, who exchange traffic settlement-free. The XConnect system lives at the applications layer; CENX functions at the underlying physical transport layer. They represent different approaches to solving what’s know as the “NxN problem”: the challenge of linking up many different services from many different providers, all through one-off traffic exchanges that rapidly become costly and cumbersome to establish and maintain.
